I lay in the mud for a long moment, chest still heaving, sword slack in my hand, when a small chime settled quietly somewhere behind my eyes.
[You Have Acquired A New Gift]
[Voice of Death]
[Description: A Bell That Contains Whispers of Death]
[Rank: Awakened]
’A Gift. From my very first real kill.’
I remembered that killing an Unorthodox creature carried only a one in twenty chance of producing a Gift at all, most kills yielding nothing but a corpse and whatever could be salvaged from it. Getting one on my very first Realm trip felt like exactly the kind of thing that would draw attention I did not currently want.
I pushed myself upright as the others approached, Arthur reaching me first, already asking questions faster than I could properly answer them.
"Are you alright? That looked—that looked genuinely terrifying, Ed."
"I am fine."
Eliza crouched beside me, checking the cut along my forearm, her earlier drowsiness entirely gone now. "Did you get a Gift?"
Something in my chest went very still.
"No," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I expected.
Eliza studied me for a moment, then simply nodded and returned her attention to the wound.
Once she had bound my arm with a strip of cloth from the bag, she turned toward the massive, unmoving body of Moynukz, still smoking faintly where the fire had scorched its scales.
"This will heal you in five hours," she told me.
I showed her a rather shocked expression.
"It is made by someone who had a Medical Affinity," she said pointing at the strip of cloth.
"We have three options here," she said. "One, we cook the meat and eat it tonight. Two, we wait for its Characteristic to surface, and Edmund consumes it, since he landed the kill. Three, Edmund performs a spirit contact with the body and claims whichever part of its body he wants outright."
’No! I don’t want to look like this idiot.’
"How much food do we have left?" I asked.
"Enough for three days, if we are careful."
I thought about it only briefly. "I will consume the Characteristic, then."
Eliza nodded, unsurprised, and gestured for the rest of us to settle in and wait.
Ten minutes passed in mostly silence, the five of us sitting in a loose circle around the creature’s body, until a faint golden light began pulsing somewhere deep beneath its ruined chest, rising slowly to the surface like something surfacing from underwater.
The moment the characteristic appeared, the body of Moynukz turned into ash and swayed with the wind.
"There," Mary said quietly, the first thing she had said since the fight ended.
I approached carefully and reached out, closing my hand around the golden, glowing shape that had risen from the wound. It felt warm and alive, humming faintly against my palm the same way the Breathing Fire Glove had the very first time I wore it.
I ate it.
The moment it passed my lips, the world stopped existing for my body.
I felt as if my body and soul were separated. I could feel two existences existing at the same time within my consciousness.
’This is the Soul that the novel talked about!’
I remembered the paragraph: Within every man and women exists a soul and a body. The body is a vessel for the soul, the body shows what a person thinks he is, while the soul shows what a person truly is. One in a thousand souls can actually leave their vessel and move to a new vessel or live in the soul world, the world where the souls after loosing their vessel resided. And one in a hundred thousand can form a connection with the soul world even when alive.
That was something that had happened to me now!
’Is this some perk I got from transmigration?’
An endless fog stretched in every direction, slowly churning, lit from within by an impossible sky scattered with stars of every color I had ever seen and several I had not. Yellow stars burned beside white ones. Black stars sat near threads of deep crimson and cold, distant blue. Shooting stars streaked past every few seconds, trailing long, silent arcs of light across the fog.
Three enormous pillars rose around me, arranged in a perfect triangle, each one stretching up into the churning sky until they simply disappeared from view. I stood in the exact center of them, and when I looked down at myself, I found nothing there at all. No hands. No feet. Simply the awareness of standing.
My shadow, impossibly, stretched out across the fog behind me, vast and mountainous, reflected somehow in the sky itself.
Beneath where my feet should have been, the ground formed a rectangle inscribed with a triangle, and in the very center of that shape sat the outline of a single open hand, palm raised, fingers relaxed, in the exact gesture I remembered from old oil paintings my mother had once shown me, the ones depicting saints and holy figures such as priests granting peace to whoever knelt before them.
I could feel spiritual power radiating outward from everything around me, pressing against whatever remained of my soul with a weight that should have crushed something as small and insignificant as myself. Somehow, it did not. Somehow, I remained, standing, intact, unbothered.
’Time does not move properly here. I have no idea how long I have already been standing in this place.’
Then Moynukz appeared.
Not the burned, broken thing I had left bleeding into the mud, but something whole again, it was restored, its eyes calm rather than hungry, its crab like limbs folded neatly at its sides. It looked at me for a long moment, and then, slowly, deliberately, it bent one foreleg and lowered its head toward the ground, the exact posture of a knight kneeling a king.
I did not know what to say to that. I did not know if there was anything to say at all.
The creature began breaking apart, piece by piece, each fragment dissolving into small points of light that drifted upward, joining the endless field of stars scattered across the fog above us, until nothing remained where it had knelt at all.
A deep, heavy exhaustion settled over whatever version of me existed in this place, and my eyes, or whatever I was perceiving with, grew unbearably heavy.
I closed them and when I opened them again, I was back in my own body, lying in the crimson mud, the others gathered close around me with matching expressions of concern.
A sharp, burning pain flared across the back of my neck, right where my spine met my skull, and I reached up instinctively, fingers brushing against skin that felt hot to the touch, faint lines forming beneath the surface in a pattern I could not see but could absolutely feel.
"What is happening to him?" Arthur asked, voice tight.
Eliza leaned in close, studying the back of my neck with narrowed eyes. "Two stars," she said finally. "He is forming a constellation."
’A constellation.’
I remembered, vaguely, some scattered mention of this from somewhere in those two hundred Chapters, a detail I had never paid particularly close attention to at the time.
"You need seven stars total, forming across your cervical region, to complete a full constellation," Arthur explained, apparently more informed on the subject than I had given him credit for. "Once it completes, you go from Seed Core straight to Bronze."
"So I need five more," I said, mostly to myself.
"Five more," Arthur agreed. "You are already off to a decent start, honestly."
I sat with that thought for a long while as the burning pain slowly faded into something closer to a dull ache, the kind that promised to linger for the rest of the night.
We gathered our things not long after, packing the mattresses and blankets away, and set off walking once more, the crimson moon still hanging low and heavy above the endless mud.
We walked for perhaps twenty-five minutes before the mud finally gave way to solid ground, and something rose ahead of us out of the darkness, tall and broken and unmistakably old.
The remains of what looked like had once been a church stood before us, roofless, its stone walls crumbling in places, ivy and strange black vines threading through every gap. Where the altar should have stood, an enormous sycamore tree had grown instead, black-barked and immense, its branches spreading wide enough to blot out a considerable portion of the sky above the ruined structure.
’This aligns with the teaching of the academy, who say that this realm is mysterious but there are signs that show that people once lived here... Though the novel’s protagonist, who is yet to come had found an ancient relic that showed a probability that this land has been Cursed By The Gods that existed in the Second Age. If that is true, then it can also be called The Cursed Land of Gods.’
Eliza slowed her pace, studying the place with the same careful, assessing look she had given Moynukz before the fight.
"We could rest here for a while," she said and nobody argued.